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ravetcofx

At what cost to the larger ecosystem. They are the base of a larger food web. Many creatures rely on eating them

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They are part of the base of a large food web, not the base of a large food web.

My child almost died from a tick. Other children do die.

I would gladly kill every tick on Earth and whatever relies on eating them so no human has to lose a kid to this again.

Do you eat meat? Do you use a car and create carbon emissions? That's destroying ecosystems all around the world, and yet here we are doing nothing about it. Ticks aren't even the base of the pyramid, as others have stated, they're one of many choices for those creatures. Can you name a single creature who relies solely on disease-carrying ticks for food?

But we have AI now to guide us and it will help ensure we prevent most major ecological miscalculations. The context is different now, given the change in the cost of planning and research into ecological side effects, unlike anything we had in the past.

AI is not a panacea.

The interplay between different components in natural environments is impossibly complex and we basically always get this wrong. Modern LLMs might be able to surface some likely effects of altering a habitat, but it's also very dependent on humans having already studied it in some capacity, there could be new or subtle second-order (and beyond) effects that we just aren't aware of and AI doesn't have the raw data to infer correctly.

What are you talking about? That's absolutely not the case for ticks. And for mosquitos it's often doubtful at best, and false when it comes to disease carrying species as there are plenty of other species available.

This wasp seems quite specialized towards ticks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ixodiphagus_hookeri

Sure. And those wasps maybe has other parasitic wasps, and those parasit wasps maybe have flees, who have bacterial diseases, who have viral diseases. All of them parasitic and all who would go extinct when that species goes extinct.

But that's not what the previous poster was talking about. This is not the basis of a food web, that's just a parasitic cul de sac. And there are basically infinite such things in nature.

Many birds feed on ticks. Some beetles and amphibians as well.

"Will eat" and is the "base of a food web" are radically different things. Humans "will eat" pistachios, but the eradication of pistachios will do absolutely nothing to the human species.

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